Bill Lucas: Architect Utopian, Tin Sheds Gallery, 24 February–26 March 2022

Abstract

Upon entering the space of Peter Lonergan’s Bill Lucas: Architect Utopian it becomes immediately clear that this is an exhibition about an archive as much as about an architect. Presented without interpretive text, the exhibition displays a sliver of a much larger, obsessively-kept archive, which Bill Lucas curated throughout his working life, kept in an ever-increasing series of leather suitcases. It is difficult to know whether the decision to present the archive to viewers without the usual wall texts and object labels was deliberate. Lonergan, a heritage architect known for his extensive career in Sydney, has had a long involvement with the Lucas archive, Lucas having worked for a time, towards the end of his life, from Lonergan’s Newtown studio. A small pamphlet free at the reception desk and a 100-page catalogue of images and essays, available for purchase, complement the exhibition and fill its interpretive gaps — though it is difficult to experience these texts and the exhibition simultaneously. Nevertheless, combined, the exhibition and catalogue present a window into the practices of an intriguing post-war Sydney architect, whose working life oscillated between the creation of regionally specific modernist housing, and deeply engaged participation in social and political activism. Lucas’s early domestic architecture was included in Jennifer Taylor’s 1972 study An Australian Identity: Houses for Sydney, 1953–63, alongside many of the architects that became associated with the concept of a “Sydney School,” or regional style for Sydney that was characterised by the use of natural materials in bushy, often dramatically sloped or otherwise difficult sites. Drawings for the two houses featured in Taylor’s text, the Lucas House (or “Glass House” as it became better known), Castlecrag, 1957, and Kearns House, Sylvania, 1954, are displayed prominently near the beginning of the exhibition space — perhaps to attract a glimmer of recognition for the architect’s work, much of which would likely be as yet unfamiliar to the broader architectural community.